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If you visited a baseball stadium as a child*, that's probably the first time you could observe that sound travels slower than light: You see the batter hit the ball, but you don't hear the CRACK until half a second later.
That half a second is a problem for Olympic runners, where every millisecond counts. When a starting pistol is used to start a race, the runner closest to the gun has a slight advantage over the athlete furthest away. To combat this, Olympic timing sponsor Omega created an electronic starting pistol that makes no noise at all, but is instead wired to speakers directly behind each runner.
Previously Omega had tried wiring a regular starting pistol (pictured up top) to speakers, but it didn't work; runners would instinctively only respond to the sound of the real gun, not the speaker-borne sound emitted a millisecond earlier. The new gun, which only sounds through the speakers, solves that problem.
The electronic gun is actually not new—it first saw service at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics—but it has now become the standard.
*Speaking of standards, or lack thereof: To our non-U.S. readers for whom the baseball stadium situation doesn't apply, what was the first instance you can recall where you could observe the speed-of-sound phenomenon? (I'm guessing that say, soccer matches don't produce the same sharp noise as a bat on a ball.)
via the atlantic
I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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Webinar
Omega's Olympic Electronic Starting Pistol Redesign
Where electronic and integrated timekeeping is not available, a crew of timekeepers is positioned at the finish line and presses a start button on their stopwatch at the sight of either smoke where the starter is using a pistol with explosive caps or a light in the front of the pistol if something like this omega were eto be used.
There is no visual tradition here, its practical purpose and application.
... not to mention it looks like a price scanner. if you are forcing yourself to pay for a superfluous item for the sake of retaining some sort of visual tradition, at least structure the form factor so that it relates to what has been used before.